Not Quite a Blog

One of the godmothers of electronic voting is Rebecca Mercuri. Her PhD dissertation introduced the concept of the voter-verified paper audit trail. I've wanted to read a copy of this thesis for a while and recently had a renewed interest in it. I paid ProQuest $37 for a PDF of Rebecca's PhD thesis, because I couldn't find it using other search tools.

Well, after looking something up in her thesis, I found that U Penn posted it. Silly me. Here it is (7.5 MB):

Electronic Vote Tabluation Checks & Balances
Rebecca Mercuri
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/grad/documents/mercuri-r.pdf

(Yes, this post is solely intended to get this document into the Google index!)

Incidentally, I noticed that if you go to the ProQuest Express Dissertation service:

http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb#search

and type in "electronic voting", Stefan Popoveniuc's dissertation is listed with a blue little "O" next to it as an "open dissertation". I remember doing this along with danah in our quest to Creative Commons-license our dissertations. And, what d'ya know? It allows free download of Popoveniuc and other open dissertations. (although one does have to give ProQuest some information... and I didn't check if Popoveniuc's dissertation is available online too.)

I suspect mine isn't in their database because of the Creative Commons issue. We'll see!